Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy

By Kelly Bauer

The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780822988113

Kelly Bauer

I Am the Tree is Kelly's debut children's book inspired by actual events that took place while she was retreating in nature.Kelly was a storyteller from the moment she could talk. She spun stories in rhymes and songs about the adventures of her family as they traveled the United States. She loves getting lost in another world, another time, and another dimension. Her favorite bedtime stories as a child, and inspiration to write, came from Shel Silverstein, J. R. R. Tolkien, Beverly Cleary, and Maurice Sendak."

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PITT LATIN AMERICAN SERIES

Catherine M. Conaghan, Editor

NEGOTIATING AUTONOMY

Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy

KELLY BAUER

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2021, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4666-3

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4666-1

Cover art: General plan of the colonization of Cautín by Nicanor Bologna, published in 1910.

Cover design: Melissa Dias-Mandoly

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8811-3 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Bureaucratizing Territory into Land Policy

2. Negotiating Land for Peace

3. Navigating Land Policy

4. Quantifying Mobilization and Land Purchases

Conclusions

Epilogue

Appendix

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acquired extensive debts and wonderful relationships on the ten-plus-year journey of researching and writing this book. The earliest portions emerged from a Theories of Ethnic Politics class with Henry Hale and a Qualitative Research Methods class with Harris Mylonas at George Washington University. The papers emerging from those classes provided the very initial embers of this project and, more importantly, started conversations about this research. I am grateful that both, joined by Manny Teitelbaum, were willing to dive into mentoring roles for research significantly outside of their areas of expertise. Cynthia McClintock provided (and provides) steady advice, leadership, and motivation to persevere through the complications and thrill of life and work in academia.

In Chile, Alejandro Herrera Aguayo graciously welcomed me to the Instituto de Estudios Indígenas at the Universidad de la Frontera, and Alvaro Bello and Hugo Zunino graciously extended that invite with thoughtful support during my time at the university and in Temuco. Sergio Toro at the Universidad Católica de Temuco provided me invaluable workspace and connections within the Political Science and Sociology Department; colleagues in the department had the joy of supporting me through my first earthquake in Chile. All at the Archivo General de Asuntos Indígenas (AGAI) helped me navigate archives and made sure the space heaters were close enough. These patchworked networks provided extensive opportunities for learning and collaboration. Among many others, I am grateful to Lientur Alcaman, Germán Bidegain, Venancio Coñuepan Mesias, Elsy Curihuinca, Hector Curiqueo Melivilu, Jael Goldsmith Weil, Gonzalo Infante Grandon, Volodia Jineo, Fernando Rosenblatt, and Victor Venegas for so thoughtfully allowing professional connections to flow into supportive friendships throughout various stages of this project. The richness of my time in Chile was facilitated by the financial support of the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Grant, and the Fulbright US Student Program. Luckily, both grants created significant opportunities for collaboration with other grantees, and I am thankful for how the grant coordinators thoughtfully created opportunities for reflection and collaboration with, among others, Carolina Arango Vargas, David Bergin, Paula Dias, Andrea Dillon, Summer Harlow, Kevin Healy, Katherine Maich, Liz Mason-Deese, Maddie Orenstein, and Manuel Prieto. Erick Langer and Todd Eisenstadt also provided thoughtful comments throughout.

This book came to life at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Navigating a heavy teaching, mentoring, and service load, I was continually supported by brilliant colleagues and friends, too many to name, who encouraged me to dive into interdisciplinarity and provided inspiring examples of how to be both a passionate teacher and scholar. The excellent students who ended up in my classrooms demanded clarity in my own thinking and writing and usefully nagged me to finish; NWU alumni Randi Knox and Carlin Daharsh provided remarkable research support during this process.

As this book became more interdisciplinary, it acquired more debts to scholars working in anthropology, geography, history, sociology, and law. I am grateful to have benefitted from the input of the interdisciplinary communities that formed around conferences, workshops, and journals. Three anonymous reviewers provided the rare sort of reviews that pulled their optimism and vision for the book through their critiques. Reviewers and editors for the Journal of Agrarian Change and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, including Nancy Postero and Helene Risør, offered similarly useful comments on earlier stages of portions of this work that appears in those journals. Colleagues at the 2018 NEH Summer Institute, Women’s Suffrage in the Americas, at my alma mater, Carthage College, offered solidarity and energy during a particularly challenging period of writing. Kristy Johnson provided key developmental editing and encouragement through successive revisions, Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press took a chance on this book, and the UPP team provided seamless support throughout the publishing process. All remaining errors and limitations are my own.

Finally, numerous communities supported my well-being, persistence, and happiness through this journey. Jeff Roberg and Penny Seymoure at Carthage College have offered more years of mentoring and friendship than I expect they imagined. During our time at George Washington University, Dina Bishara, Kerry Crawford, Lisel Hintz, Jake Haselswerdt, Michelle Jurkovich, Fabiana Perera, and Varun Piplani became brilliant colleagues and friends. The formal and informal volleyball communities in Temuco; Santiago; Washington, DC; Lincoln; and Los Angeles put up with my inconsistencies as I jumped between research trips and long writing sessions, and offered enriching, external perspectives on my work. My US and Chilean families had the love and patience to support me through writing. Growing up, my parents taught me to see and hear the world, and my brothers taught me to fight; while they aren’t always thrilled that has pulled me away from Wisconsin, their support is unwavering. The love and support of my husband, Claudio, is written into these pages, as he dives into debates about Chilean politics and research ontologies and epistemologies, supports me through the precariousness and ambiguities of academia, and attempts to perfect my Chilean Spanish. I am lucky that he knows how to strike the impossible balance of encouraging me to be fearless and knowing when to pull me out of an escalating protest, both literally and figuratively.

This work analyzes what it is to imagine what could be and fight against what is; I hope that the words that follow contribute to further individual and collective reflection.

INTRODUCTION

It was a typically frigid and rainy morning on April 12, 2013, in Temuco, the capital of the Araucanía region in southern Chile. I was awake early to attend a march, scheduled to descend from the top of Cerro Ñielol into the city to assert demands of the Mapuche Indigenous community demands with the accompaniment of trutrukas, long horns made of bamboo and a carved-out cow horn, and kultrunes, ceremonial drums.

Cerro Ñielol is a historically significant hill overlooking downtown Temuco. On November 10, 1881, Mapuche leaders supposedly ceded their land to Chilean colonists on the hill, a result of the Chilean armed forces’ brutal Pacification of the Araucanía military campaign pursuing the territorial continuity of the country and space for agricultural development on previously unconquered Mapuche territory. For some, the resulting agreement, La Patagua del Armisticio, ushered in peace and the founding of the regional capital of Temuco. For others, the agreement solidified the military conquest of the Mapuche nation and institutionalized persisting patterns of subordination, colonization, and marginalization. The presumed exact location of the agreement, la Patagua, continues to serve as a central meeting point to conduct Mapuche politics; even the dictator Augusto Pinochet was presented a toki-kura, a stone pendant symbolizing the authority of chief, from allied Mapuche organizations on Cerro Ñielol in 1986.

The April march was a continuation of recent events. In January 2013, assailants, alleged to be Mapuche, set fire to the house of Werner Luchsinger and Viviane Mackay, a wealthy elderly couple. The Luchsinger family owns one of the largest and historically conflictual plots of land in the region where, in 2008, the young Mapuche activist Matías Catrileo died after being shot in the back by police officer Walter Ramírez during a land occupation on a plot of land owned by the cousin of Werner Luchsinger, Jorge Luchsinger Villigier. By the time the police arrived at the fire, the house was destroyed and the couple was dead. However, the husband did shoot and injure one of the attackers, Celestino Córdova, who was the only detained that night. Literature from a radical Mapuche organization was reportedly found at the scene, but no individual or group claimed responsibility for the attack. The government responded quickly. By noon the following day, President Sebastián Piñera reached the region, announcing plans to improve security by declaring a security zone, allocating additional police, and creating a specialized police force. Minister of the Interior Andrés Chadwick went further, suggesting a declaration of a state of emergency. Officials called for the assailants to be charged with terrorism under a controversial, Pinochet-era law that, since the return to democracy, has nearly exclusively been applied to Mapuche activists. In the following week, there were nine additional arson attacks; prominent landowners spoke of creating armed self-defense groups; truckers blocked the Pan-American Highway, protesting the uncertain security situation; and civil society organizations criticized the application of the terrorism law.

Image: Image I.1. View of Temuco, Chile, from Cerro Ñielol, April 2013. Photo by the author.

Image I.1. View of Temuco, Chile, from Cerro Ñielol, April 2013. Photo by the author.

For Mapuche activists, the government’s security-focused response was insufficient and myopic; if Mapuche individuals were responsible, the violence was an expression of unheard and unmet demands about broader structural conditions. The government needed to recognize the Mapuche as Indigenous peoples with internationally recognized rights to self-determination and autonomy, rooted in the Mapuche peoples’ connection with ancestral territory. For the group of leaders that gathered in April, the events of January 2013 highlighted the need for a historically splintered movement to clearly articulate and assert the collective demands of a united Mapuche community. Diverse organizations and prominent Mapuche leaders formed the Pacto Mapuche por la Autodeterminación (PACMA, Mapuche Pact for Self-Determination). PACMA announced plans to assert their rights to self-determination and autonomy; indeed, on April 11, PACMA organized their first conference on self-determination, bringing together leaders to discuss specific demands, proposals, and processes. The march on the following day would present these decisions to the government.

Image: Image I.2. PACMA Reunion at la Patagua, Cerro Ñielol, Temuco, April 12, 2013. Photo by the author.

Image I.2. PACMA Reunion at la Patagua, Cerro Ñielol, Temuco, April 12, 2013. Photo by the author.

Image: Image I.3. PACMA Reunion at la Patagua, Cerro Ñielol, Temuco, April 12, 2013. Photo by the author.

Image I.3. PACMA Reunion at la Patagua, Cerro Ñielol, Temuco, April 12, 2013. Photo by the author.

We arrived to la Patagua by 8:00 a.m. on April 12, as PACMA leadership had publicized on social media. The few people who had arrived poked at a small fire and passed around steamed chestnuts, waiting for the crowds and leadership to arrive. Several prominent lonkos (chief, head in Mapuzungun) arrived by mid-morning, overseeing the ceremonies and a long discussion about whether to follow through on the march as scheduled. PACMA intended on delivering a letter declaring the group’s intentions to self-govern, but everyone was concerned that a march of a hundred people would not garner enough attention. Ultimately, leaders and attendees agreed that PACMA leadership would present the letter to the government and hold a press conference, and postpone the march.

I left perplexed. PACMA was the work of some of the most prominent, experienced Mapuche leaders. There were no signs of repression beyond what could be expected at similar events. A few carabineros (police officers) in riot gear stood awkwardly at the exit of the hill, and an old reporter from a conservative newspaper circulated through the ceremony, taking pictures of everyone in attendance. As the march was broadly publicized, it was confusing as to why leadership ultimately seemed eager to diffuse it.

While descending the hill, a friend shared details he had pieced together in hushed conversations throughout the morning. In a last-minute scramble to cripple the planned march and any momentum for the public articulation of Mapuche self-determination demands, the government organized ceremonies throughout the region to present resources to a number of Mapuche communities. Many Mapuche leaders and community members who had planned to attend the march decided to stay in their communities to receive the visiting politicians and participate in the last-minute ceremonies. PACMA, in fact, only learned of the government’s plans late the night before, leaving them scrambling to avoid appearing as if the organization and call for self-determination lacked broad support from the greater Mapuche community.

I scoured the internet, finding confirmation on the website of the Chilean government’s Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (CONADI, National Corporation for Indigenous Development). The intendente (appointed governor) of the neighboring Los Lagos region and the subsecretary of the Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (National Women’s Service) presented subsidies and fishing equipment totaling 184 million pesos to more than five hundred Lafquenche fishermen in Castro, Chiloe. The national director of CONADI held a press conference to announce two public lotteries to fund development and productivity projects in the Araucanía region, totaling 680 million pesos. In Valdivia the subdirector of CONADI and intendente of the Los Ríos region announced the eighty-seven families in the region to receive a subsidy to purchase land. On the day of the planned march, prominent politicians representing various portions of the government allocated more than US$1.4 million to Mapuche individuals and communities, in addition to an undetermined amount to subsidize land purchases.¹ This government strategizing crippled the planned march, which explained the bizarre unfolding of events on April 12.

This chain of events stands in stark contrast to narratives of post–Pinochet Chilean governance as centralized, technocratic, and, above all, neoliberal. When I moved to Chile, I planned to study how Mapuche communities pursued their demands through the government, focusing specifically on communities’ pursuit of territory and degrees of autonomy through land policy.² This policy was created with the promulgation of Indigenous Law 19.253 in 1993, which recognized a number of Indigenous demands and established CONADI to oversee implementation. Article 20B of that law created an institutional path through which Indigenous communities and individuals could apply to the government, petitioning for the government to purchase and transfer formal land titles to historically occupied land. These purchases are funded by CONADI’s Fundo de Tierra y Agua Indígena (FTAI, Fund for Indigenous Land and Water), which is the budgetary focal point of CONADI’s work, accounting for 50–75 percent of CONADI’s yearly budget between 1994 and 2013. Even from a distance, there was significant controversy and contestation over the process.

Given the strength of Chile’s neoliberal project and reputation of good governance, why are there inconsistencies over which land the government returned to which communities? How did Mapuche resistance efforts interact with state domination efforts, and what is the significance of this contestation for broader patterns of governance? I expected to find a story of Mapuche communities navigating either through or around constrained institutions that governed to extend neoliberal governance by protecting market interests in the region and by preserving transparent and technocratic policymaking. I expected that Mapuche communities’ extrainstitutional mobilization stemmed from extremely constrained opportunities for institutional resolution of demands, particularly for the communities pursuing land that confronted the interests of powerful economic stakeholders. And I expected that inconsistencies in the government’s implementation of Indigenous land policy occurred in rare moments when the state’s efforts to extend neoliberalism through policy temporarily converged with Mapuche demands.

After living in southern Chile for sixteen months, those narratives regarding Mapuche communities navigating in or around a state operating on an insulated, hegemonic, and neoliberal logic of governance felt increasingly insufficient, if not outright inaccurate. Rather, policies and procedures were interactive and negotiated, shifting depending on the actors, place, and context. One Mapuche leader, whose story is discussed in detail in chapter 3, negotiated to exchange his community’s votes in an upcoming election for a politician’s help expediting their land claim. Politicians frequently took flour and oil to Mapuche communities when campaigning prior to elections. At a small We Tripantu (Mapuche New Year, celebrated in June on the summer solstice) celebration, a visiting politician acknowledged his purpose for attending at that particular moment far more transparently than I expected: As you all know, it is an election year, so we are here to listen.³ At the April 12 march, few were surprised that government officials strategically implemented policies and programs at that particular moment to weaken the mobilization and articulation of Indigenous demands for self-determination. I too came to expect this overt, dynamic bargaining. Yet because government officials responded to the planned march through the guise of implementing institutionalized policies, the links between these officials’ work and the march were never reported, preserving the existing façade of neoliberal, insulated Chilean governance. How much of the work of government officials, and the Chilean state’s governance strategies, is left off the record?

Negotiating Autonomy interrogates the Chilean government’s land policy response to Mapuche Indigenous communities’ territorial demands, focusing specifically on when and how the work of government officials shifts in response to actors operating both inside and outside the state. I argue that the dominant narrative about the ideological and insulated neoliberalization of Chilean governance inadequately characterizes how the Chilean government responds to Mapuche communities’ demands for territory. Rather, the state dynamically interacts with and responds to actors working inside and outside institutionalized procedures—public policy is not exclusively the outcome or expression of state domination but rather a middle space where Mapuche demands and Chilean governance are consequentially contested. State officials rely on a combination of formal and informal governance strategies, working to assert a vision of the nation-state that preserves and extends both neoliberalism and the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region. Simultaneously, Mapuche communities and individuals present institutional and extrainstitutional demands that challenge and work within these governing efforts. Negotiations between these efforts produce contradictory, uneven outcomes, highlighting the importance of studying public policy as a consequential arena of contestation structuring both Mapuche resistance and Chilean domination.

This contextualized contestation and negotiation is significant in revealing internal contradictions in the neoliberal project. I analyze neoliberalism as the economic, political, and social restructuring of state and society according to a market-driven logic. The anthropologist Aihwa Ong describes neoliberalism to task the state with governing through freedom (2007, 4), working to center politics and citizenship around the individual’s responsibility to resolve demands through market mechanisms, and the state should work to funnel demands toward the market. Foucault (2008, 116) describes this as the neoliberal anti-state, with the objective for the state [to be] under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state. Accordingly, neoliberalization